Situation
New Hanover County Schools serves 25,000 students across 45 school sites in coastal North Carolina. But with only two digital teaching & learning specialists responsible for vetting and managing the district’s large edtech stack, manual processes slowed progress. More edtech requests came in from the over 3,000 staff members, and the district’s edtech ecosystem sprawled beyond the team's scope. With high instructional standards and increasingly complex state and district requirements, district leaders needed a single system to organize and automate their edtech management.
Challenges:
- A cross-curricular team of digital learning specialists and curriculum specialists spent hours reviewing tools, and met monthly to approve or deny them.
- Data lived across multiple spreadsheets, limiting the team’s ability to see the bigger picture.
- Increasing state mandates regarding student data privacy and accessibility demanded deeper scrutiny of edtech resources.
Insights
District leaders realized that the spreadsheets ultimately treated edtech vetting as a technical checkbox instead of an instructional strategy. Organization was the top priority, but they also envisioned high-quality, curriculum-led vetting. Instead of having the entire cross-curricular team review each resource simultaneously for different purposes, the team sought to implement a workflow that would route each resource to the appropriate reviewer and stop if a reviewer denies the request, preventing unnecessary additional reviews.
If you’re looking for something to help you structure and organize all of the privacy and security state mandates, LearnPlatform can do it.
Lindsey Evans, Digital Teaching & Learning Specialist
New Hanover County Schools, North Carolina
Solution
The team chose LearnPlatform by Instructure as a single, centralized hub, first organizing its edtech tool inventory. “In the beginning, we just needed a database to store all of these resources that lived in so many different places before,” noted Digital Teaching & Learning Specialist Lindsey Evans.
As the system creates and uses the automated workflow, it applies the appropriate approval statuses, conditions, and usage tags at each step. The process begins with school-level approval, followed by district curriculum review, and then final approval by digital learning specialists for data privacy and security. This consistent process saved significant amounts of time for the district's digital learning specialists, who are the final reviewers of the edtech resources. The shift visibly excited Evans, as she explained, “Now that we understand automated workflows inside of LearnPlatform, we can focus more of our time on working with teachers again, which is amazing."
Outcomes
After they organized their edtech stack and automated the flow of new requests, the district saw a huge increase in vetting efficiency—moving from a multi-spreadsheet system to a streamlined workflow that has successfully processed over 740 resources. Evans notes the organization is the first step to deeper workflows with compliance, explaining that "If you’re looking for something to help you structure and organize all of the privacy and security state mandates, LearnPlatform can do it.”
Beyond the numbers, the true win is the clarity and digital safety the district has created through LearnPlatform. Teachers can quickly see which tools are approved, which are in the vetting process, which were denied (and why), and which perform the same function but more safely. The single source of truth eliminates guesswork and satisfies state mandates. Next, Evans and her team plan to create a public library so families can also see which tools are being used and how they meet data security and accessibility requirements.
With the full picture now in view, NHCS leadership has confidence that funds are being responsibly allocated to edtech tools—and that those tools are compliant and pedagogically sound.
LearnPlatform is like a one-stop shop that pulls together our inventory, vetting process, and the usage data.
Lindsey Evans, Digital Teaching & Learning Specialist
New Hanover County Schools, North Carolina
Organize and automate your edtech tools with LearnPlatform from Instructure
